SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Anybody who lives or travels through rural parts of the U.S. can tell you the cellphone service can be incredibly spotty, frustrating, inconvenient, sometimes even dangerous, especially in natural disasters like the flooding earlier this month in central Texas, situations when clear, effective communication is vital. Why is it so hard to have good cellphone service in certain parts of the country after all these years? Curtis Knobloch is president of Mobile Solutions at the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, and he joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
CURTIS KNOBLOCH: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Why is cell service so poor in so many rural areas?
KNOBLOCH: Geography is a challenge. Populations are a challenge. In many rural areas, they do not have that many people. They have a lot more animals in many cases. And just by definition, it's economically and geographically challenging.
SIMON: Does the geography or topography affect cell service?
KNOBLOCH: Yes, both are challenging. The geography and depending on the terrain, whether you've got a low valley or a higher mountain or even a hill. It depends on the types of trees. Pine trees can make life difficult for being able to send out and reach out with, you know, the spectrum. So any of that can make it really particularly difficult.
SIMON: I have to ask a question - as a city kid, how come in cities, big, tall skyscrapers don't seem to get in the way of cellphone service, but a pine tree can in a rural area?
KNOBLOCH: Much more infrastructure is deployed in the cities to be able to work around the skyscrapers, the interior buildings, depending on the - even what the building is constructed of because those - many times those signals you receive inside a building are not coming from the services outside of the building. There's actual infrastructure deployed internally in the physical structure. So they spend the money. They deploy the resources to be able to get all of that infrastructure in place because the business case is there. There are enough people to do that. In rural America, that's not the case always. It's more challenging.
SIMON: So because there are fewer customers in a rural area, a cell provider has less incentive to be active there?
KNOBLOCH: They have less incentive. Many of them would really like to be and have been. But just given the way that the business has developed, we've had so much aggregation of services across three carriers in the United States, where we've really had these large carriers come together. And now there's nationwide service. Brings a lot of ubiquity to the service, ubiquity to the pricing, ubiquity to the cost of being able to deliver the services because you get so much scale when you have large systems like that. You just do not have those kinds of opportunities in rural areas.
SIMON: I mean, it's difficult to read the accounts of people who were in central Texas, who were not able to communicate when disaster struck by cellphone. There's a part of you that has to think, wait, this is America in the 21st century. There should be cellphone service.
KNOBLOCH: Yes. My heart goes out and my prayers go out to the victims, their families, all of those communities that have been touched by this flooding. It's heartbreaking. And, yes, it is. It's - when we find ourselves in a situation like that, it's hard to understand what could happen, what could be done to be able to eliminate that at this time, and particularly in a time when we have the technology. It's just really looking at the business case. Who would be responsible for that? Deploying is one thing. Then you have to maintain. You got to maintain the upgrades, and those are expensive. So you need a good, strong business case, and that business case is challenged when you have such sparse population and a lot of geography, and in some cases, challenging terrain.
SIMON: Have we learned from recent disasters in which cellphone service has been difficult that the federal government, the American people have an interest in improving rural cellphone service?
KNOBLOCH: I believe we've learned this. I think we should know this. I think it's just a hard case to present, you know, particularly at a time when we're really looking at, you know, a budget and, you know, what's going on right now with the budget process. And I understand it is expensive, and I know that there needs to be a way to - once you deploy, you've got to be able to maintain those networks. But I don't think that we should at all ignore the value of having those networks in those places because you never know when it could be you or one of your loved ones and whose life is saved. But this is really just an example of how challenging life can be in rural America. I still live in rural America, so I know what this is like. I live it every day.
SIMON: Curtis Knobloch of the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. Thank you so much for being with us, sir.
KNOBLOCH: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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